William Harris, a systems verifier at Cleveland’s Palmerton-Inge, was dismissed this week when it was discovered he had done no work since being hired 13 years ago, – despite being glued to his computer (lately his home laptop) an average of 12 hours a day.
The situation came to light when he accidentally sent a day’s worth of typing to the entire company via email. The document contained one sentence – “A man with a zebra played the xylophone in Quincy” – typed 6,934 times.
A check of his files revealed he’d done the same thing every day since his hiring, a total of 16,593,443 sentences typed.
“He claimed that nobody gave him assignments,” says a company source, “and he wanted to look busy.”
From the start, Harris had been perceived as a hard-worker and rising star – coming in early, skipping lunch, and rarely using the restroom as he typed away. He’d received the monthly Go-Getter award six different times, and in 2009 was invited to sit directly behind CEO Cleo Parkman at her annual What’s Happenin’! presentation.
“Everyone just assumed he was working hard,” says the source.
To prevent such an occurrence from happening again, the company has installed the new Mortonsen IV software, which automatically detects identical sentences that are typed more than 10,000 times.
